Book of the week: The Human Quest “opening the window for innovation”

Let’s be frank: we could all do with a little cheering up, and remind ourselves of humanities potential to great things. The Human Quest is a book that sets out to address not only the challenges we face, but the solultions.

Over the past 10,000 years, we have lived on a stable planet with extraordinarily favorable environmental conditions. In that time, we have developed tools that have let us grow at an astonishing rate, from handheld axes to modern day industrial machines and fossil fuels. We have dumped chemical pollution into our planet’s waters and skies, and cut down its forests. And yet, our resilient planet has bounced back from these assaults, while continuing to provide ecosystem services such as food, clean water, and clean air.

But the next ten years could prove to be the turning point for our seemingly healthy planet. We may have stretched Earth’s resilience to its breaking point.

Over the past 50 years, our unsustainable ways of living have begun to put immense pressure on the planetary processes that support our wellbeing and economic development. Loss of biodiversity, erosion of the world’s soils, and the steady pressures of climate change are only a few of the clues that some of the planet’s support systems may be close to failure.

I’ve ordered a copy – but from what I see on the site it looks like the kind of thinking we need to embrace.

It also reminds me that hope – at times a fragile thing – can still shine.